With respect to Mr. Yon, the English are convinced beyond all doubt that they understand both Arabs and Muslims. But what this translates to in the real world is a preconceived notion that there is “an Arab way” and “a Muslim way” that should be respected.
The “Arab way” and the “Muslim way” have been disastrous for them, leaving them under the rule of despots, caught on a path of barbaric primitivism, and with a mood of defeatism and pessimism. If anything, the 20th Century to them was grasping at secularism, and *any* way of living *other* than “the Arab way” and “the Muslim way”.
For them, socialism or even wretched communism was a step up from the pit in which generations had lived in misery and anguish.
What America is trying to bring to the region is heavenly, compared to what they have long suffered. Americans entered the fray with no preconceived notions of who they were facing. Prince or peasant, if they acted honorably, they were our friends. If they acted treacherously, they were our enemies.
Americans cut through thick layers of nonsense and artifice, and brought with them radical new ideas of modernism and efficiency.
Despite what most people think, the siren call of democracy around the world is not freedom and liberty. Its truly irresistible force is that it is a better way of doing just about anything. It is staggeringly efficient compared to any other “way” of living or government.
Everything that America did that was “the American way” has been a smashing success in Iraq. Everything we tried to salvage from the Arab and Muslim way there has been a mess or a disaster. We should have completely rewritten Iraq in our image. Let them change it back years from now if they wanted. But the irony is, they probably wouldn’t want to go back to most anything that is of the Arab or Muslim way.
Moving to Afghanistan, America has made more errors along the way. From the start, their economy was in such a shambles that we could have hired most of the adult males in the country as minimum wage laborers. For a few billion dollars, this immense labor force could have rebuilt much of their ruined nation.
And away from the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the policing up of those villains could have been accomplished with considerable speed. And the Afghans, like the Iraqis, when shown a better way of doing things, will often jump at the opportunity.
More than anything else, that country needed a WPA, to get its economy rolling again, putting money in the pocket of the common man, and food in his, and his families stomachs.
But again, they *don’t* need to do things the Muslim way. They desperately need some other, any other, way of doing things.
The Taliban were the past. Murderous tyrants who ruled by whim and homicide. Those are not people you negotiate with. They are, and always will be, part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Despite what the English think. T.E. Lawrence is long dead. It’s time to let go of their romanticism of both the Arab and the Muslim world. Don’t let their rose colored glasses result in denying them a place in the 21st Century.
Good Post!